Shoot and Edit Challenge: Flowers (after)

The lovely and talented Ashley and Jill have teamed together to share their awesome photo editing tips and tricks; this week’s prompt/theme is flowers so I decided to use a photo that I took on my recent visit to the gorgeous campus of Duke University.  I'm always in awe of the photos that have been edited to have that fairy garden effect, so I gave it a try, low-budget style.  Here's what I did in Picnik:

1. Manually adjusted the exposure.
2. Manually adjusted the color temperature ever so slightly.
3. Added the layer, Garden Lights No. 1 (Thanks, Ashley!); applied the "screen" setting at 50% opacity.
4. Added the layer, Snowy Bokeh Texture; applied the "overlay" setting at 75% opacity.
5. Combined everything.
6. Applied "boost" at 20%.
7. Applied "vibrance" at 35%.
8. Cropped it ever so slightly (the dark spot in the lower left corner was distracting to my eyes).

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

I initially attempted to create this effect in Pixlr, but for some reason I simply couldn't get the layer mask function to work properly and gave up in frustration.  All things considered, I think the edit turned out pretty well using Picnik's tools.

If you'd like to learn how to make your photos go from good to wow, be sure to click below: